May I share the words of this wonderful hymn with you?

What a Friend we have in Jesus,
All our sins and griefs to bear!
What a privilege to carry
Everything to God in Prayer!
O what peace we often forfeit,
O what needless pain we bear,
All because we do not carry,
Everything to God in Prayer.

Have we trials and temptations?
Is there trouble anywhere?
We should never be discouraged,
Take it to the Lord in prayer.
Can we find a friend so faithful
Who will all our sorrows share?
Jesus knows our every weakness,
Take it to the Lord in prayer.

Are we weak and heavy-laden,
Cumbered with a load of care?
Precious Savior, still our refuge,
Take it to the Lord in prayer.
Do thy friends despise, forsake thee?
Take it to the Lord in prayer;
In his arms He’ll take and shield thee,
Thou wilt find a solace there.

As I let the beauty of these words sink into my parched soul, I started trying to get closer to my Lord. Then Christ dropped His own bombshell! He would be my Friend - on one condition: He wanted full control of my life - lock, stock and barrel! That really shook me up!

I hadn’t realized that Christ expected to be LORD of my life; as well as my Savior. I didn’t know what it really meant to be a disciple of Jesus. Nor did I know that there was a cost involved in being friends with Him, and becoming the kind of person He really wanted me to be. So I didn’t realize just how far short of God’s idea of what it means to be Christ-like that my own life was. And I had been a Christian since I was twelve! I was absolutely aghast! What a struggle began in my heart !

“You want me to give up my right to myself, my independent nature, my control over myself, my right to decide what was best for me?” I stormed at Him, “Forget it! What have you ever done for me?”

I kept on yelling at Him. “You know how desperately unhappy I am - yet you don’t care at all! You won’t do a single thing about it. And I’m supposed to hand full control of my life over to you? Give me one reason why I should!”

I was furious with God! I was a good church-goer, I tithed, read my Bible. What more did He want? Nothing I ever did seemed to please Him. But, like a Pharisee, who could quote the Scriptures at the drop of a hat without obeying them, I didn’t believe or obey what I read. For almost a week I struggled with this idea of handing the complete control of my life over to the Lord. Years ago I had feared what He might want of me - and I still feared it! Being a “good” Christian had never brought me any happiness. Ask my kids - they sling off at me a lot about this. And being a “good” Christian in my marriage had brought me only misery.

One church I had belonged to taught me that I was “saved to serve”. The way I translated this message was that God had no personal interest in me; my only value to Him was in my possible usefulness to Him. Why would any one with a grain of sense want to hand full control of their life over to such a tyrant?

But Christ had made it clear to me that this was the price of His friendship. John 14:15, 21, 23-24 says:

If you love me, you will obey what I command. ... Whoever has my commands and obeys them, he is the one who loves me. He who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I too will love him and show myself to him. .... If anyone loves me, he will obey my teaching. My Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him. He who does not love me will not obey my teaching. These words you hear are not my own; they belong to the Father who sent me.

And John 15:14 says:

You are my friends if you do what I command.

I felt I had no choice - because I knew by now that Christ was the ONLY hope I had of being able to cope with the dreadful, relentless situation I was in. So I said - very reluctantly, very dispassionately, very grudgingly - All right Lord, I hand my whole life over to you.

I soon discovered that this decision was very much like getting married; the full implications of this commitment would only sink in later. Because - no matter what I may have hoped would result from this - Christ wouldn’t drop His standards one bit. The Scripture He now kept confronting me with was 1 Peter 3:1-4 :

Wives, in the same way be submissive to your husbands so that, if any of them do not believe the word, they may be won over without words by the behavior of their wives, when they see the purity and reverence of your lives. Your beauty should not come from outward adornment, such as braided hair and the wearing of gold jewelry and fine clothes. Instead, it should be that of your inner self, the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is of great worth in God’s sight.

“Fair go Lord - when it is it going to be MY turn? Why are you always on Bob’s side? Why don’t I mean anything at all to you? Why do I have to be the one always in the wrong, the one always having to say sorry? Why is it all right with you that this man continues to degrade and humiliate me. It’s just not fair! When will it be my turn to get some justice?”

I sobbed and sobbed. Obviously I didn’t yet have “the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is of great worth in God’s sight”!

And nothing seemed to change - either in Bob, or in me. And so the bitterness within me grew. And there were certain hymns I refused to sing:
Have Thine own way Lord, have Thine own way,
Thou art the potter I am the clay
or
All to Jesus I surrender,
All to Him I freely give.
or
Take my life and let it be;
Consecrated, Lord, to Thee
Take my moments and my days;
Let them flow in ceaseless praise.

Ceaseless praise???? What did I have to praise God for? Where was this wonderful friendship He’d promised me? He’d reneged on the deal!

And then He showed me a passage of Scripture I had never seen before; a passage that at last encouraged me to start to believe (although timidly) - that He DID know, and care, and understand - at least a little. It was Isaiah 54:4-10

“Do not be afraid; you will not suffer shame. Do not fear disgrace; you will not be humiliated. You will forget the shame of your youth and remember no more the reproach of your widowhood. For your Maker is your husband – the LORD Almighty is his name – the Holy One of Israel is your Redeemer; he is called the God of all the earth. The LORD will call you back as if you were a wife deserted and distressed in spirit – a wife who married young, only to be rejected,” says your God. “For a brief moment I abandoned you, but with deep compassion I will bring you back. In a surge of anger I hid my face from you for a moment, but with everlasting kindness I will have compassion on you,” says the LORD your Redeemer. “To me this is like the days of Noah, when I swore that the waters of Noah would never again cover the earth. So now I have sworn not to be angry with you, never to rebuke you again. Though the mountains be shaken and the hills be removed, yet my unfailing love for you will not be shaken nor my covenant of peace be removed,” says the LORD, who has compassion on you.

This seemed such a personal Scripture. Dare I believe that He did care about me personally - that He did know and understand what I was going through? I latched on to the verse about Noah.

“Lord, I need a LOT of encouragement to believe that you really care about me like this! You gave Noah the rainbow as a sign of your faithfulness to him. If you REALLY want me to believe that you think of me in such a personal way, please - sometime today may I see a rainbow somewhere?”

Later that day I went to visit a friend. I glanced at the sky as I left. Blue skies, sun shining, no clouds. I sighed. Oh well, had I really expected a rainbow?

While I was over at my friend’s place, she showed me a funny greeting card she had received, a bashed up garbage can - with a rainbow shining above it!!! And she wondered why I burst into tears. That card spoke volumes to me! But how could I explain to her how much that card meant to me?

I had been that garbage can, because I had been treated like rubbish all my life, dumped by everyone who should have cared about me. And now there was a rainbow shining above me! God really did care about me!

A few years after this, Bob retired from work. And I still cherished my dream - the dream that he would yet come to the Lord, and that even in these later years I would know the joys of a Christian marriage. We would yet pray together, worship together, serve God together in our twilight years - and make love together, the way God had intended..

But this was not to be. A few years ago, Bob suddenly dropped dead at home. This meant:

• the end of his life on this earth
• the end of our marriage
• the end of my dream.

A few years after my husband’s death, I decided I needed the help of a Christian counselor. I wanted to overcome the way I thought about myself - a total failure as a wife, a mother and a Christian. For years I had felt that I was a freak - because I wasn’t interested in “womanly” things; homemaking, sewing, cooking, shopping. I didn’t dote on the opportunity to mind my grandchildren. I was abnormal - or should I say subnormal?

And I didn’t feel madly in love with God, even though I had grown closer to Christ. My father, who also obviously had a very poor opinion of himself, once said to me, “I wouldn’t want to belong to a club that would have me as a member.”

And that sums up how I felt about God and myself. If He wanted to be my Friend, then He had precious little to do with His time - and His own standards couldn’t be very high!

I was with this counselor for two years. I knew I couldn’t stay with her for ever, but both she and I realized that it would take more than two years to undo the harm done to my personality, by the mistreatment of others, and my wrong perception of God. Two particular things she said always stick in my mind:

“You can never really forgive anyone from the bottom of your heart, until you have acknowledged to yourself the depth of the hurt they have caused you.” and

“If something brings a memory to mind, and that memory wakes up strong negative emotions in you, stay ‘there’ with those emotions that you have bottled up all those years, and work through them, until they disappear.”

And this is what happened to me some time ago.

It was a Saturday. I had just received an email from a friend. Somehow it brought back to me the distress of my marriage. Quite unexpectedly I was once more aware of bitterness welling up inside me, not bitterness toward Bob, who had now been dead several years, but bitterness toward God, all the bitterness I had experienced during those traumatic years - and never really dealt with.

“Okay, God”, I said, “I’ll follow my counselor’s advice and stick with it. Well, God, I have no trouble confessing that I still feel very bitter toward you because you weren’t there for me when I needed you. But what do I do now I’ve confessed it? I can’t say “sorry” because I haven’t repented yet. I’m still too flaming angry at you! So what am I supposed to do? And it’s church tomorrow!”

I went to bed in a bad mood, and woke up in a fouler mood, agonizing over whether or not to be a hypocrite and go to church, or stay at home and give Satan something else to chortle about. So I went to church - and sulked all the way through the service. I was morose and gloomy and still angry with God.

At the end of the service those who felt they needed prayer were invited down to the front. Well I certainly needed prayer - desperately. So I went down. The elder I wanted to speak to was already talking to someone else so I stayed back out of earshot, but within his line of vision. Then a lady came over to me and just started chatting to me. That did it!

“What’s the use Lord?” I yelled at Him in my mind. “ Here I am willing to give it a go - willing to try and get right with you, willing to ask one of your elders for help - and this happens! I get bailed up by this woman! I’ve had it with you!”

I nodded curtly to the elder, muttered “I might ring you”, and stormed out. I went home to continue sulking, and once more feeling very close to despair.

Later that afternoon, that same lady rang. “I’m sorry about this morning,” she said, “I just came down to chat with you. I didn’t realize that you were there for prayer.”

“That’s all right,” I muttered ungraciously, “I’m not angry with you. I’m just angry with God about something else.”

She continued, “But a wonderful thing happened! Because you’d gone, the elder turned to me and started talking with me. I’d only came down the front to talk to you. I had no intention of talking to him! Yet somehow he encouraged me to open up about myself and talk about serious issues in my own life. He then prayed with me. And Ruth, if you hadn’t have been there down the front, this would never have happened.!”

My heart started to rejoice with what the Lord was doing in this lady’s life – and my bitterness flew out the window and hasn’t returned!

So where do I go from here? I’ve been widowed now for several years. I would dearly love to marry again, and experience all the joys of marriage as God intended it to be; which can only be possible when BOTH husband and wife love and serve the Lord.

1 Corinthians 7:39

A woman is bound to her husband as long as he lives. But if her husband dies, she is free to marry anyone she wishes, but he must belong to the Lord.

I had to learn this verse the hard way! Whether the Lord has someone for me or not, I have no idea. But I am willing to wait until He shows me.

And lately I have been greatly blessed by Grantley Morris’ webpages, especially Developing Your Love Affair With God

I am now - although very slowly - starting to believe that I really do matter personally to God, that He DOESN’T have favorites, that He regards me in a positive way - that I am special to Him.

And gradually my attitude toward Bob is changing too. I can see that he was as much a product of his upbringing as I was of mine. I can see that because I let bitterness over the areas that divided us saturate me, I overlooked the very real good qualities he had.

Recently I wrote this to Grantley Morris about my late husband:
* He was a loyal family man. In fact he said once that in his eyes “loyalty” and “love” were the same thing.
* His only interests were his family and work. He didn’t find work very fulfilling - he worked to provide for his family. He never talked about the Protestant work ethic - he just lived it.
* He never drank, smoke, or frequented clubs.
* He used to bring home all his pay, and would only keep out $20.00 for himself. This would cover any haircuts, his fortnightly lotto ticket (the only gambling he did), and minor items like nails, fuses, batteries.
* When we lived in the country, if he were late home there were only two possible reasons; he was at the jeweler’s getting his watch repaired –again – or he was at the barber’s.
* Once we moved to a capital city, the only times he was late home was if his commuter train was late.
* He showed as much care and concern for my side of the family as he did for his own, and Christmas presents for both sets of parents and siblings were identical.
* On three occasions when my mother needed rescuing from her own tragic domestic situation, we never discussed whether we should take her in; we just went up and got her.

How can I possibly be talking about the same man that I’ve just been complaining about?
Any negative statement I’ve made about Bob is the truth. Perhaps I ought to qualify that a little. It was the truth as I perceived it at the time, because I focused on my own problems and my own misery, instead of focusing on Christ.

But now my life has moved from despair to delight as I daily enjoy rich fellowship with the One who is the ideal husband, who is my Maker, the LORD Almighty, my Redeemer; God of all the earth - because I am part of the Body of Christ, which is the Bride of Christ. And I will be included in the Marriage Supper of the Lamb, when all of us who belong to Christ get to Heaven.

But I don’t forget, I can’t forget, that all the scars that are still visible on my invisible soul are the results of my taking the wrong road, thus turning my back on God and spurning His warning: